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Elon distinguished two types of supercharging in the future and created a new class of superchargers "city superchargers" for apartment dwellers vs. long distance traveling that will be slower to charge.

I was intrigued by that, also. Something between an 80 Amp HPWC and a 'normal' Supercharger? Wonder what timeframe for what added level of charge he was thinking about? Leaving your car there all night? I hope not... While you had a meal? How would that work? Not sure how this works 'downtown', exactly....

I wonder if this is related to the charging trial that we heard about. (That was in the UK right?)

I assume it is intended for things like apartment buildings where you will be parked all night, and the system spreads out the available power to the cars that need it. (Sort of like the large charger install, 100 stations?, at a university in CA.)

The one feature that I think will be needed is a way to say that I will need x% by y so that you get priority charging speed over the people that don't need it right away.

And in dense cities where are they going to find the space?
Are these private superchargers that a large condo complex may install?

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From the shareholder meeting transcript:

transcript said:

Okay. So most millennials living in apartments rather than homes, what can we do to make it easier to own and charge a Tesla without a garage, so we are establishing supercharging locations a lot more in city, supercharging locations and there will be a little lower power. But in between a high-power supercharger which is optimized for long distance trips, but more powered than would typically be found in a home garage, so wherever the car is being parked, whether it’s the apartment or work or somewhere in between, we are going to make sure that there is a place to charge your car, even if you live in an apartment. One of the key things for apartments is to manage the power is if you got a lot of cars parked in your garage and you have to design the system to handle, hypothetical case, where all cars are drawing maximum power at the same time, then you need a crazy amount of power. So it’s important to have a system that load levels the power. So that they don’t have to build a new substation just to supply the apartment building. And so that’s one of the things that’s prices are being implemented, but no question, we need to solve this problem for apartments, not just homes, from [indiscernible].

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I think (and hope) he was talking about having a many-headed, load-balancing Supercharger. I hope that wasn't just Elon thinking up an idea on the spot.

It would make sense to me for Tesla to be working on a more flexible Supercharger setup with more heads,.

Current Superchargers are 2-headed and (I seem to recall from others' comments) share power in chunks of 30kW.
Rather than balancing between either of a pair, it would be better if a site could balance across all cars that are plugged in.. It would really help cars charge faster and be better able to cope with varying charging speeds.
For an urban daily Supercharger, it would be better to be able to balance down to the 10kW level.

Existing Superchargers share in roughly 10kW increments. Each charger module in the cabinet has to be connected to one car or the other.

I'm not sure Supercharging is the right solution for a high rise parking garage. I would think that centrally managed EVSEs with a couple PowerPacks would be an optimal solution. If you're managing the charging load based on the feed for the entire building, but you're not responsible for paying for the energy for the whole building, then you could forego the PowerPacks and just modulate the AC charging so that it doesn't overload the building feed.

I wonder if this is related to the charging trial that we heard about. (That was in the UK right?)

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Elon originally announced the concept of city superchargers at the UK Model S first-delivery event (2014), nominally on an experimental basis and reflecting the fact that London has an unusually high proportion of expensive homes (ie. places where potential Model S owners might live) without on-street parking.

The timing also reflected the fact that their plan for UK superchargers had gone down the drain (well, into a sticky legal dispute) a few weeks before launch and they needed something positive to announce, plus the fact they had spare supercharger cabinets that couldn't be installed at the originally intended sites.

In terms of where to find the space, those pilot city-centre superchargers were installed at hotels and modern shopping malls with (typically) underground carparks. There hasn't been much expansion since that original roll-out (indeed, one location has closed because the hotel concerned suffered a gas explosion and had to be rebuilt; they seem to have given up on putting the supercharger back after the building work was done).

I've been thinking about how they are going to do the superchargers in Manhattan. I suppose they could buy some parking lot but the property is not cheap at all. Most expensive in the country. More likely they could use a floor in parking garages, although most garages here are valet-only. I wonder if they would do fully-valet superchargers? Would people be willing to just hand their keys over? The costs are going to be so high for them in any case.

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